With the recent release of GNOME 3.6, once again the GNOME developer cabel have managed to royally upset their third party developer base – in particular those who develop GNOME Shell extensions and themes. This blog post sums up the attitude of the GNOME developers nicely and should be required reading for anybody who thinks of developing an extension, theme, or application for GNOME 3. GTK 3.6 breaks virtually every third party theme out there. GNOME Shell 3.6 breaks a large number of third party extensions. The removal of the ability to display debugging messages in Looking Glass in GNOME

This post discusses the differences between the DBus interface in GNOME Shell 3.6 and GNOME Shell 3.4. I also demonstrate how to use some of the new methods provided to remove an installed extension, to download and install an extension from extensions.gnome.org, and how to flash your screen.

Once again the GNOME developers have managed to complicate things beyond belief. Why the GNOME UI Nazis decided there should be no simple way to change the background for both the login screen, the desktop backgound and the screen lock background is beyond comprehension! In a previous post I explained how to change the GDM (GNOME Desktop Manager) background image. In this post I explain how to change the Lock Screen background image. Taking Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle) as an example, as root edit /usr/share/backgrounds/beefy-miracle/default/beefy-miracle.xml. Here are the contents of this file: <background> <starttime> <year>2012</year> <month>01</month> <day>29</day> <hour>00</hour> <minute>00</minute> <second>00</second>

Hurrah! Finally, somebody has stood up to the recent re-emergence of the arrogant GNOME UI designer (“UI Nazis”) whose world view is “we decide, we know better than you, you simply do as we say.” In an recent email entitled Rules for design in Gnome, Federico Mena Quintero, one of the two original founders of the GNOME project, stated that: The design team IS welcome to: * Produce designs and propose them to Gnome at large and the relevant maintainers. * Produce designs and implement them in experimental branches, which then are subject to maintainers’ approval for merging into the